Kitten with a Whip (1964)

Usually a good movie needs to take believable characters into an unbelievable situation. This film is slightly different. In true cult style, it crosses barriers. The situation is real, and lived out every day. It about a man who tries to do the right thing, and live by a code, but is taken advantage of by people who are intent on taking advantage of him just for the thrill of it.Unfortunately, that describes most of what America has become since the making of this movie. The man who is taken advantage of is too much of an American aristocrat to really be in danger. As shown in the film, he has many friends, and many assets, and he will not be soiled in the end.By this, the film shows that had the man not been so well regarded and a part of the "establishment", he would have been in dire straits.And it is true, that America has become a place where vicious thugs (from wealthy families), act out aggressions and seek thrills of hurting others, and creating terrifying situations , not out of a need for survival or paying the rent, but just out of a sick desire.

****SPOILERS**** Weird and unbelievable movie, well after the Bill Clinton/Monica Walinsky affair I'm willing to believe anything, about an up and coming California politician David Stratton, John Forsythe. Stratton got the state senate seat in his sights but ends up getting blackmailed kidnapped beaten and almost killed by a young women, and her oddball friends. Stratton found the bunch sleeping in his daughters bedroom one morning when he came back from a political dinner, both his wife and daughter were on vacation.The young women Jody, Ann-Margret, gives David a sob story about her being a runaway from a broken home and the jerk falls for it. I really think that Stratton fell for Jody's gorgeous VA VA VOOM body more then anything else. The guy may be a bit foolish and naive but he's not blind. David goes as far as going out to the store to get Jody a new set of clothes but as David is away Jody calls her friends to come over to David's place and party. It turns out that Jody isn't the sweet and innocent fawn that she claimed to be but a hardened juvenile delinquent who just escaped from a home for uncontrollable young girls. That after she tried to burn the place down and stabbed an attendant who tried to stop her, wild and crazy girl that Jody is. Crashing David's house that night Jody's friends Ron Buck & Midge, Peter Brown Skip Ward & Diane Sayer hold David hostage as they drink and drug themselves into such a wild frenzy that Midge later leaves them in terror. Ron in what had to be a drug induced hallucination tells Buck to slash him with a razor. It's his way of showing that his will-power can stop the pain and bleeding from the wound! Instead he ends up being in danger of bleeding to death. Getting David to drive the three across the border to a doctor that they know in Mexico to treat Ron they go on a drug and drinking binge in Tijuana. It gets so out of hand that even Jody can't take it anymore and gives David back his car keys to take her back across the border to California. Judy then plans to give herself up to the police and face the music. David driving with Jody to California is then attacked on the highway by Buck & Ron who drive David them off the road but the two are so stoned and drunk that they lose control of their car and go crashing off a cliff into flames and to their deaths. With Jody thrown clear from David's car and smashing her skull killing herself, only David survived the double car crash. The police covered up David's involvement with the three dead felons and thus saved his reputation his marriage and political career. David laying in his hospital bed with his head and ribs and bones broken can now recover and get back to the normal world that he lived in. Thats before Jody walked, or slept, into his life with nobody but himself and the police knowing for better or worse what happened. Don't you just love those Hollywood happy endings.

Director Douglas Heyes oversaw 9 of the better Twilight Zone episodes, including the classic Eye of the Beholder, and one of the 2 or 3 best Boris Karloff Presents Thriller episodes (The Purple Room). Bringing this context to Kitten With A Whip, you realize you are in the hands of a master storyteller, and also, exactly what you are in for: a not-quite-fantasy but nonetheless feverishly nightmarish Twilight Zone episode.As with the best TZ episodes, you are asked what you would do if something on the scale between patently impossible to utterly insane happened to you. The setup is simple. A mentally unbalanced teenager sneaks into your house while you are away, threatens you with accusations of rape and the destruction of your political ambition (which appear about to reach fruition) to gain control once you return home, and effectively takes over your life. It is like a typical TZ scenario, a Twilight Zone-style turning a character's 'normal' life on its head, and letting the angst and desperate quest for an out flow from there.I see no big theme here, other than the noir theme of crazy fate putting its finger on you. That seems to be the entire point here. Separated from Serling's big theme plots that showed man against himself in the form of prejudice and fear, Heyes may seem a bit lost. But his directorial hand is sure as ever, and the story is as engrossingly told as that of any TZ episode. I suspect Heyes enjoyed taking TV's Bachelor Father and subverting the precepts of his bourgeois existence in the rudest, most thoroughly shaming way possible. Maybe, after all is said and done, it is through subversion that Heyes gets his chance to challenge the bourgeois status quo, as he did routinely while working with Serling. For many- and yes, possibly even the director- Kitten works as a jet black comedy.This film doesn't have a great reputation, though among its undeniable assets it boasts a fine performance from a man often unfairly given the Bob Cummings light comic actor brush-off by Hollywood. John Forsythe would appear In Cold Blood a couple of years later, another film light years away from the scrubbed sitcom milieu.8 stars. Give it a spin.

I watched this movie as an MST3K and actually found it fairly engrossing. True, it was lacking in a few areas, but for an MST3K, it was astonishing. Personally, I would've directed more sexual tension between the senator and Jody ... and made the ending a little less pat ... more ambiguous. This movie is a perfect candidate to be remade.